Al Conant

My Path to Instructional Design:

About Me:

Broadcast Professional, Instructional Designer, Educator, & Photographer

Hi, I’m Al Conant. My most important role in life has been being a dad. Finding creative ways to explain complex ideas to my son gave me an organic introduction to the importance of learner-centered, bottom-up teaching and the power of building upon prior knowledge. Long before studying these topics, I realized that by knowing my son’s references (the books, movies, and tv shows that he likes), I could use those references to make analogies and explain anything he was having trouble with understanding. These experiences with my son dovetailed well with what I would study at both Umass Amherst and Umass Boston. Being a volunteer teacher at Blue Hills Regional Technical School has allowed me the opportunity to put the educational theories I’ve been learning into practice. As a 30+ year broadcast professional, my personal technical interests, and my more recent education and experience as an educator, I bring together both the knowledge of the content required to design learner-based instruction and the technical skills to bring high production quality to that content.

I have a professional background in video production, broadcast television, and photography. I’m currently pursuing a Master of Education in Instructional Design at the University of Massachusetts – Boston and have a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (Video Production and Media Literacy) from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. I’ve been a technical director and crew chief at Ch. 5, WCVB, since 1998, and a volunteer teacher of video production, video editing, photography, and photo editing at Blue Hills Regional Technical School since 2017.

I got my start as a technical director at the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications, a quasi-state-run distance-learning television station in Cambridge, MA, that produced over 900 hrs. of interactive programming per school year for K-12 students and teacher development. That amazing opportunity interrupted the bachelor’s degree I started in 1988, but in 2018 I returned to education to finish that degree. I enjoyed the educational experience so much that I wanted to continue on, and when the reality of Covid-19 started shutting everything down, including my 2020 graduation, I decided there was no reason to wait and enrolled in my current master’s program in the fall of 2020.

I’m a lifelong learner with passions for education, technology, photography, and design. In 1996, I co-founded, with my longtime friend Jim Johnston, one of the first browser-based internet chatrooms called CyberSalem. Though the site is long gone, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine still has our front page frozen in time. (Wayback Machine: CyberSalem) In 2011, my son and I planned a trip to Alaska, and I decided to invest in a Nikon D5100 DSLR to take on the trip. I took 2,500 pictures on that trip. 11 years later, I’m on my second camera, a Nikon D7200, and have taken over 160,000 photos, and some of the best can be seen at www.alconantphotography.com.

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